Elemental According to the Mouse
by Princess Artemis
Summary: This is a toughy to describe. A unique POV on events during and after my fic The Thief of Hell. Cid's in it... A cute little tale.


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**Elemental According to the Mouse**

A very original and pointless fanfiction by Princess Artemis

© S.D.Green, 2002

This story takes place mostly during my FFVII fanfic _The Thief of Hell_...told from a very unique perspective.

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There once was a mouse, an ordinary little mouse. Her life was mostly consumed with doing what mice do: scurrying along walls, finding food, and avoiding becoming food for larger animals. This all changed rather abruptly one day, and she found herself in a rather curious predicament. She knew nothing of lab rats, except that she wasn't one, and as is usual for mice, she didn't trust the very large two legged things that lived in the same place she did...but one day a furless one saw her and trapped her.

Certain she was about to become a meal for the furless creature, she was somewhat surprised to find herself in a see-through box. She knew it was see-through because she kept bumping into the walls. But it wasn't entirely a bad thing-there was food, water, nesting material, and a little box in the corner to hide in. The only fear she had now was of being eaten by the furless one, but this fear was soon banished. The furless creature fed her, she saw, and she also realized it kept her box clean. At first she didn't like it when it picked her up, and she would bite it, but she later discovered that she liked being held and her fur stroked by it.

It wasn't the best life, she supposed, as there weren't very many walls to scurry along, and no male mice anywhere, but this was largely offset by the fact that she didn't have to be afraid of being eaten all the time.

Then one day, Furless picked her up with something in its hands. It was a funny shaped object, and she thought perhaps that it must have been a hornet of some sort, because it stung her. But she fell asleep right away so didn't have time to really wonder about it.

When she woke up, she was in her box again, coughing up something quite outside her experience. Something liquid and green, not at all like water, and not exactly pleasant, though it was neither entirely unpleasant. After that unexpected event, she quickly got herself a drink of water, and decided to run some energy off in a wheel that was in her box. A short meal followed and then she went to sleep.

She might have forgotten about the events of the day before as a mouse was wont to do, but for some inexplicable reason she remembered them. It was rather odd for her, for, as a mouse, she just got used to things and didn't exactly think much. And the green liquid hadn't scared her at all. So she wondered. And she wondered that she wondered, for it was also not in the general make up of mice to actively wonder about things.

Things just got stranger and stranger after that. Furless watched her a lot, and she found herself soon unable to fit into her little hiding box. Was she getting bigger? The wheel seemed smaller too. Furless still took her out of her box and petted her for a little while every day. Then one day when it picked her up, it dropped her abruptly with a cry and ran out of the room. She wondered why, and went to get a drink. One little lick on the ball of her water bottle and she was scared for life. Now she _hated_ water...it stung! She thought for sure she would die that day, the water made her feel so bad. It made her sad, and she curled up in a corner of her box and moped.

She would have wondered that she was moping if she weren't too busy doing so. Mice didn't mope...

Some days later, after a long nap and the sudden realization that she hadn't eaten in a while nor was she hungry, she sat and thought. Now why didn't she want to eat? She avoided the corner with the water, because she had begun to realize water was poisonous to her now. She was beginning to realize and think about things that no ordinary mouse should. She looked at her paws, really looked, for the first time ever. They were not ordinary mouse paws. They were bigger, her nails sharper, and her fur darker...but there were pretty sparkles of red and gold flickering through it like a living thing. She found she liked that color and that flickering quite a lot, so she stared at her paws for a while.

Furless came in and checked on her, but it never tried to pick her up after the last time. She looked at Furless, and saw surprise and delight in its face. For some reason Furless brought a shiny round object and set it up against the side of her box, and she saw her reflection in it. Her fur wasn't gray anymore; now it was dark and flickering like her paws, and when she looked at it closer, fire licked up her sides and her entire coat was in flame.

She wondered at it.

She bounced around excitedly, letting the fire and smoke curl about her. She only stopped when she smelled her bedding smoke. She looked down in surprise...her bedding had begun to char where she touched it. She didn't like that. Now what would she curl up in?

But she still liked the fire in her fur, and after kicking a lot of her bedding away so it didn't smoke, she sat in front of the shiny object Furless left her and just gazed at herself for a long time.

And then she knew. She wasn't a mouse anymore, not an ordinary one. She was a Fire mouse. She looked at her eyes, pools of swirling blaze, and she looked at her fur, tiny tongues of flame all over. She liked it. She liked Fire. Mice normally didn't, but she adored it. Later, after Furless removed her untouched water bottle, she would gather small piles of bedding and hold her paws on them, kindling them and setting them aflame, and then she would roll around in the flames.

She loved Fire, and she became despondent when she ran low on bedding. But Furless had seen her and her Fire once, and provided her a large pile of new bedding to play with, and she was happy again.

Then one day she watched as Furless brought another box into the room, this with a strange baby creature in it. Normally it would have scared her, but she just snorted, and flames came out her snout. The little creature had a snake tail, a little cat face, and a goat head growing out of its back.

Furless took the funny animal out of its box, and stung it with the same hornet it had stung her with before. The animal fell asleep, and she saw for the first time what had probably happened to her while she slept. Furless made little tiny cuts in the animal with a sharp thing, and stung it a few more times with a hornet, then set it in a little container filled with that same odd green liquid. Lifestream...she recognized it now...but not exactly Lifestream, it was a little different. As a Fire mouse her senses were more acute than they had been before.

Later, Furless retrieved the animal, but to her shock, it wasn't a funny thing anymore, it was a snake! Now mice didn't _like_ snakes at all, so she refused to look at it, even if it didn't scare her as much as she thought it should. Maybe because she knew a snake would never try to eat Fire.

Again, Furless brought in another animal, a little fish. It was in Water, and that made her cringe. Furless performed the same sort of experiment with the fish, and now it didn't seem to care about Water, or need it. She could feel it-it was Air. The Air fish made her shiver.

Furless did a lot of little experiments like that. Once it brought in a snake and came out with a funny creature like it had before. Once it came in with a bird and left with an Earth bird. She could tell the Earth bird didn't like its new attributes at all, but tolerated them.

She learned a lot listening to Furless; she found she could understand it when it talked, and she knew the funny creature was a classic Chimera, the green liquid was called Mako, and that Furless used crystallized Lifestream called Materia to make the Elementals. She learned she was an Elemental; she learned that there were four Elements that Furless was using-Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. She was proud to be highest on the list. She knew that Fire was the purest Element around. She also learned that Furless was called Sri-Danat, and that it was a human, and a male.

Fire mouse watched the experiments Sri-Danat performed with fascination. She liked Furless for some reason, even if he couldn't stroke her fur anymore. He kept her with a ready supply of combustibles to play with, and he seemed to be nice for a two-legged thing.

Then one day two other humans came in to do an experiment. She wondered why Furless wasn't there; instead there were these two...Furry and Female. Furry used the hornet to sting Female, and Furry did the same kind of things with Female that Furless did with the animals. Then he took Female to a very big container of Mako. She watched with some interest, curious. She wondered what Element Female would be.

Sometime later Furry came back and let Female out. Female was normal enough, but she knew that Female was going to be an Air. Many days later, Furry and Female came back, and the mouse was right-Female was an Air Element. Female made her very frightened...something about Female was very dark and sinister, and it wasn't just her new appearance, with her sharp dagger teeth and silvery-clear fur. Fire mouse cowered and hid her head under her paws, waiting for Furry and Female to leave. She was very glad when Female left.

For a long time no one did any experiments, but Furless always came back and talked to her and gave her more bedding to burn. 

Then, after a great while, Furry and Female came back, with someone else. Fire mouse sniffed, and decided it was a Chimera, but a different one than the ones Furless had, because it looked like a human. And Furry and Female did awful things to Chimera; she was very sad for it, and very scared, so she hid and didn't watch. Furry and Female took a long time with Chimera...she was so scared she hid under her bedding and burnt most of it up, finding some comfort in being surrounded by Fire.

After they were done, Furry and Female put Chimera in the Mako, and left. She was happy to see them go. She didn't like Furry, and she was scared of Female. She wondered if Chimera would be as scary as Female-she smelled it would be Air too.

But she never found out. When Furry returned to fetch Chimera, Chimera was very sick, and they left, and she didn't see anyone again for a long time.

Furless didn't come back for a long time either. No one did, and she was sad, because she was lonely, and there was no more bedding to burn.

After too long, two new humans came in. She only knew that because she sensed it she woke up. It had Mako in it, so she called it Mako. There was another person, and it gave her shivers, but not like Female did. So she called it Many, because she felt there were many in it. Mako and Many watched something on a screen nearby, and then Furless came back! She was happy, because she missed Furless, and she hoped he would have bedding for her.

But Mako and Many caught Furless, and they were very angry, angry about what Furless had done to Cid...whoever Cid was. She found out Many was named Vincent. They watched what Furry and Female had done to Chimera, and Furless was very sick about it. She pawed at her box, trying to get out; she didn't like to see Furless so distressed.

But then something unexpected happened. Vincent, Many, became something else, and unholy Fire filled the room. It melted the glass box, setting her free, and as the Fire swept around the room, she reveled in it.

While she was enjoying all the magnificent Fire, she missed when Mako, Many, and Furless ran out of the room. The Fire raged for a long time, destroying everything except her, and she danced.

When the Fire finally died down, she realized she was even bigger than before. So much power from so much Fire apparently had fed her and made her stronger. But she looked around, and there was nothing left but charred metal and melted scrap. Furless was gone, so she ran out the door, looking for him.

She never found him again.

In fact, she never saw Furry, Female, Many, or Mako again.

She was lost in the mountains.

But she wasn't afraid. She felt a lot of Air and a new Element around, one that made her feel very safe. She knew she belonged above Air, and maybe...yes, she belonged below the new Element. Ether, that's what it was. So she was very comfortable, although with so much of the two Elements around, there was an imbalance and she couldn't go down the mountain into the Elements like she would have wanted. They would have snuffed her Fire out...she knew the Ether was chasing the Air out of the way.

So she went into the caves for awhile. She wasn't afraid to be eaten, and she didn't need to look for food, but it was nice to scurry along walls after such a long time. Sometimes she would bother dragons just to get them to breathe Fire on her.

She stayed in the mountains for a long time, not sure when it would be safe to leave. Eventually though, she did, because there wasn't anything to play with in the caves, and the dragons were getting annoyed with her and tried to stomp on her instead of breathe Fire on her now.

She traveled a long way down the mountain, and went down into the place full of buildings she saw. The grass was dry...maybe from the Ether and the Air war that had happened some time ago. For whatever reason, she delighted to set the grass on fire.

Unfortunately this brought the attention of the local humans, and they looked scared of her, and she was scared too. They looked dangerous...especially when they brought Water to douse her flames. She ran away from them, and tried not to set any more grass on fire, lest they try to put Water on her too.

Saddened, she wandered around the town, missing Furless and wondering if she would ever get to set Fire to anything again. Slowly she found herself drawn to an Element-apparently they were not all gone in the Fire Many had made.

The Element seemed to have a house, so she wondered if it might be Female or Chimera. The other Elements weren't two-legged humans, and they didn't live in houses like humans did. But she didn't feel scared, so she was uncertain. The Air Elements frightened her, and she thought Female and Chimera were Airs.

Nevertheless, she went to the door where the Element was, and scratched at it.

When no one arrived, she went around the back and found a lot of grass, and a door...maybe...yes, she couldn't resist, and she set the whole yard on fire, and danced in the flames. And just as she hoped, the Element and another person came out to see what was going on.

She scurried rapidly away from the Water the Element sprayed all over the yard, but then when her wonderful fire was out, she went and sat right in the middle of the yard, looking up at the Element. 

It was Chimera. But she was surprised, because it wasn't Air, but Ether. Chimera looked at her, then went and picked her up. And she was very content, because Fire belonged below Ether, and she felt very much at home with Ether near her.

Chimera carried her to the other human, and Fire mouse looked at it. It was a her, like Female, but not as scary, and she had an Ether star on her finger. So she called her Star.

Star reached a hand out, but Chimera stopped her. "She'll burn you, Shera."

"Is she...an elemental?" Star asked.

"Yeah. Probably the fire mouse Cloud told us about. I suppose she survived because of that...I mean, after Vincent burned down the lab." Chimera stroked her fur, and she was very happy, because she liked being stroked and no one had touched her since Furless had been burned the last time. She knew that she couldn't burn Ether.

"What do we do with her, Cid?" Star asked, looking at her.

"I don't know...I get the feeling she might like some fire though," Chimera said, and he took her into his and Star's house, and set her down on a round black plate. Then Chimera turned a knob, and little blue flames leapt up around her, and she was very happy indeed and danced around in them.

"She's so cute!" Star exclaimed. Then she smiled. "I suppose she would be a dangerous pet to have around."

Chimera laughed. "Yeah...I don't know what kinda kid you got brewin' in there, but I don't want our first baby trying to get too close to a fire element!"

Fire mouse happily rolled around in the blue Fire, not terribly concerned about the conversation. She knew she had been a pet before, Furless' pet, and she liked being a pet, but she didn't like hurting people. Although she thought she would never get tired of the blue flames or being around an Ether Element...it seemed so right somehow.

"I don't want my baby getting burned either Cid. But we can't let her run around town. I bet she's why we've been having so many fires," Star said.

Chimera scratched his chin. "I wonder if Ifrit would take her in? She would be with her own kind there."

"Let's summon him and ask."

So Chimera picked her up and took her outside, and Fire mouse snuggled up in his hands. Then Chimera got out a Materia and did something with it she had never seen Furless, Furry, or Female do. There was green all around, and suddenly the biggest Fire Element she had ever seen was standing in the burnt back yard.

She watched the new Fire Element intently. Ifrit they had called it...it had big horns, and looked a lot like a human, but not quite. Ifrit looked confused, and then turned its wonderfully Fiery gaze at Chimera.

"What do you want?" it asked, upset.

"I was wondering if you might not want a pet mouse," Chimera said, and held Fire mouse out to the other Element.

Ifrit looked at her, and flames snaked out of its mouth. She was almost ecstatic! She leapt out of Chimera's hands and ran up to Ifrit, pawing at its yellow leg, and almost swooning when she felt all the pure Fire the Element was made of.

Ifrit gave her a strange glance, and then picked her up in its big hands. It looked back at Chimera, then at her. She could barely contain herself, and flames erupted from her fur, bigger ones than she had ever made before. Chimera made her feel safe, being an Element above her, but Ifrit was FIRE!

Ifrit snorted again, expelling more flames from his mouth. "I...suppose. I've never had a pet before." The large Fire Element tentatively stroked her fur, and Fire mouse made even more flames in excitement and happiness. Ifrit actually smiled, and petted her a little more.

Then Ifrit flew away, with her in its hands, and soon she arrived with her new friend into a land filled to the brim with Fire. She didn't know if it was a whole world of Fire, or if it was just Ifrit's house, but to her, the not so ordinary Fire mouse, it was paradise.

The End

Author's note - This is Negative Creep and Very Metal's fault. Blame them :)


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